Daily Archives: November 26, 2008

Tennessee strong safety Eric Berry may be the best all-around player in college football. He has seven interceptions, which he has returned for 265 yards and two touchdowns. Only two Tennessee receivers have that much receiving yardage and only one has more receiving touchdowns. [Emphasis added.]

Scott Reid of the Orange County Register hangs a big ol’ “kick me” sign on the backs of all of the idiot school presidents and conference for leaving all that TV money on the table by turning their backs on a football playoff.

… BCS officials have spent the week congratulating themselves in private over the ESPN deal that is a 56 percent jump over the BCS’ current 4-year, $320-million contract with Fox. But even if you figure in ABC’s $30-million annual fee to televise the Rose Bowl the deal is but a fraction of what CBS pays out each year to televise the NCAA basketball tournament and what some longtime college and conference administrators say an eight or 16 team post-season would command. CBS’s 11-year NCAA basketball tournament deal is worth $6.2-billion. In other words by taking a playoff tournament off the table, college football is costing itself more than $400-million a season. [Emphasis added.]

$400 million a year. That’s a staggering amount of money. So here’s my first question – if the presidents and conference commissioners are the greedy bastards everyone says they are, why are they leaving that kind of jack laying around? Does Mike Slive, who just squeezed the hell out of CBS and ESPN on new SEC TV contracts, strike anyone as the type of guy who’s willing to let bygones be bygones when it comes to negotiating a postseason deal? How about Jim Delany, who went to war for a year with Comcast over Big Ten TV? You think he’s the kind of guy who’s OK with leaving any money on the table?

What gets me about Reid’s argument is that he’s comparing apples and oranges and hoping nobody notices. CBS broadcasts 65 games of March Madness. Is it logical to expect the same amount of TV money for a quarter of the number of games in a football tourney?

Reid also conveniently forgets about those conference regular season broadcast deals, like the ones the SEC just struck. How much would those be devalued if D-1 football adopted an extended playoff?

Now it may be that a playoff would be a financial boon to schools not in BCS conferences, but before you make the silly argument that a playoff is being blocked so that the decision makers can

… keep the gravy train rolling for those constituencies – the bowls, fat cat boosters and administrators – at the expense of their schools’ and their sport’s economic best interests…

you might want to ask if that’s really how the numbers add up for the average SEC school. I suspect that Mike Slive has squeezed the numbers a lot harder than Reid gives him credit for. It doesn’t add up, as much as Reid wants it to.

I’ve been hoping, but not expecting, that Tennessee would boldly go where no SEC school has gone before and take a chance on a Mike Leach hire, both in terms of seeing how a Big XII offensive attack would translate into the SEC and also because the guy truly marches to a different beat.

Alas, if the internet rumors swirling around are true, it looks like the Vols are headed in a different direction with Lane Kiffin. However, Chris Low does give me some hope of a personality injection if this is in fact the case.

…What I know to be fact is that Kiffin has already started talking to people about coming with him to Tennessee. One of those people is former Ole Miss coach Ed Orgeron, now an assistant with the New Orleans Saints. Orgeron was a recruiting whiz at Ole Miss, and he worked with Kiffin on the Southern California staff earlier this decade. I could see Orgeron coming as either a defensive coordinator, associate head coach and/or recruiting coordinator…

If you’re not surfing the Georgia Tech message boards this week, you’re missing some comedy gold. They’re as confident a bunch as they were in 2006.

My current favorite topic comes from the posters speculating about whether Spurrier’s (always the typical Tech fan’s favorite coach to live through vicariously) visitor’s scoring recordmight be in jeopardy, based on Tech’s epic 41-point scoring barrage laid on Miami last week.

For the record, that vaunted Tech triple option has scored less than 20 points in a game this year more times (five) than it’s broken 30 (four). And for what it’s worth, Georgia has exceeded 41 points four times this season.

As might be expected, Texas Tech’s blowout loss to Oklahoma had some impact on the voting. The Sooners have climbed into a four way tie for first. Overall, there’s a great deal of consolidation in our minds all the way down to the thirteenth slot, but with this week’s slate of rivalry games and next week’s conference championships, I don’t believe all of that will last.

Quote Of The Day

“Give them credit, but I think everybody can see that Georgia’s going to be a force to be reckoned with. I’m very proud of this team and this university, and we’re not going anywhere.’ — Kirby Smart, AJ-C, 1/9/18